Innovation News

Newark, NJ - According to Andrew Sheldon of NJBiz, "Christine Barbieri saw a problem growing in slow motion: The senior citizen population in North Jersey was growing rapidly in areas where there was a lack of transportation infrastructure to bring them to the health care establishments they needed. So, she and co-founder Donald Jones created MediCoupe, which is like Uber for patients and their health care providers. There was just one problem: MediCoupe needed help getting its own business moving before it could provide transportation for others.

Then they found the New Jersey Innovation Institute, a corporation within the New Jersey Institute of Technology campus in Newark.​“NJII is a very unique entity and has been very instrumental in getting our company off the ground,” Barbieri said. “In health care, the stakeholders, executives and decision makers are not necessarily the same people, so they’ve been instrumental in helping us navigate that system.

“(They) also helped us define our business model and get our technology functioning. I think what was originally an overwhelming task — something that seemed insurmountable — now has a critical path and a feasible way to scale. And that’s all because of NJII, their mentorship and their top-down introductions.”All this … from a university?

Welcome to Higher Ed 2.0. A place where colleges are leveraging their institutional knowledge (both faculty and student researchers) to proactively solve problems in the business community.And they’re doing this to help solve one of higher ed’s biggest problems moving forward: Finding more revenue.

NJII President Donald Sebastian said the organization was founded in April 2014 as a way to help NJIT to act as an active participant in helping to foster the state’s technology companies.For the full story: http://www.njbiz.com/article/20151116/NJBIZ01/151119857/innovative-action-njii-housed-on-the-campus-of-njit-is-out-to-change-the-way-higher-ed-and-business-collaborate